Literary Analysis of the Surgeon as Priest

The doctor worked in a godlike manner. Richard Selzer uses 1st person perspective in his narrative essay “The Surgeon as Priest”. No other doctor could understand the patient’s illness; it would take more then a doctor to solve this mystery. Opening with the description of the day Yeshi Dhonden is to “make the rounds” and describing Dhonden as an “emissary from the gods” the author sets the scene for the remarkable medical feat he was about to witness. He explains the room the “clutch of whitecoats” were waiting in by using phrases like “ill- concealed dubiety” and “suspicion of bamboozlement” to describe what the air in the room was “heavy” with. Ending the introduction by giving a physical description of Yeshi Dhonden the author illustrates the setting just as it is seen. The diagnosis is equally anonymous to Dhonden as it is to the “Whitecoats”, by clarifying that the author sets up what is about to happen. The information that Dhonden has spent two hours prior to doing the rounds “purifying himself” to accomplish the task at hand contributes to the meaning of this narrative greatly. The description even goes further to present that he prepared himself by “bathing, fasting, and pray[ing]”. This sets Dhonden up upon a pedestal because the majority of the “whitecoats” had spent the hours prior to the examination by simply having breakfast and going about a normal morning routine. The doctor stands overlooking the patient “favoring” nothing on her body, but he maintains this connection between him and the patient for “a long time” and this action gives off a sense of equality between the two. Regular onlookers to the examination could notice “no physical sign” of her illness. Dhonden then as if to conjoin himself with the patient “takes her hand” and very peacefully holds it in his own and “feels her pulse”. As the two sit there it was as if they went into a “special place of isolation” and Dhonden was in no rush to withdraw from this state. The